Fighting media bias -- and winning

A shocking new series of videos exposes Planned Parenthood's gruesome practice of harvesting body parts of babies they had aborted. Yet for the most part these videos are not covered by the mainstream media. Around the same time, an American dentist hunts and kills a lion in Africa, and the media make him virtually a household name.

In fact, the Media Research Center (MRC) reports that Cecil the lion had gained 15 times the mention and attention from the network news media, compared to the explosive Planned Parenthood videos by the Center for Media Progress.

This is a recent example of the left-wing bias of the mainstream media. That the media are biased is not news. What is news is the progress that has been made in the last few decades to expose that bias. And much of that progress can be credited to one man, Brent Bozell.

Brent Bozell, the founding director of the MRC, based in northern Virginia, was honored on Saturday by Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council with the Vision and Leadership Award.

Syndicated columnist Bozell is a nephew of William F. Buckley Jr., and by way of full disclosure, Brent is my second cousin. But we never met until the early 1990s in my capacity as a TV producer for D. James Kennedy when I went to Brent's office to interview him on media bias. I have interviewed him multiple times since.

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In 2010 he told our viewers, "There is a mythology about the news media, particularly, in that they say that their job is: A, to report the news, and B, to deliver ratings. In fact, their job is to educate with a message, regardless of what it does to their ratings. In the last 10 years, you have seen the news media spiral into this far left political agenda … regardless of the fact that it is destroying them in the process, where the networks have all lost 50 percent of their audiences, where newspapers are crumbling, where magazines are falling apart, and yet, they continue projecting this agenda, because of their ideology."

Through systematic recording of thousands of hours of news and information programming, MRC catches the mainstream media in sins of commission, but perhaps the biggest bias is in the sins of omission – what the media choose not to cover, such as the recent Planned Parenthood scandal.

Saturday's function was the closing banquet of Family Research Council's very successful Values Voters Summit – where even some of the key Republican presidential candidates came to speak, including Donald Trump.

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At the award banquet, Bill Walton of On Common Ground radio, said: "Before Brent, we had a sense of it [media bias]. But he set out to prove it."

I got to congratulate Brent before the ceremony and ask him for a statement for this column. He said, "The two things that drove me – in 1987 [when he started the MRC] only 25 percent of Americans thought the media was biased. The second thing was that it didn't matter what the issue was – whether it was economic, defense or social issues – if you had to go through the filter of the left wing media, you'd never succeed." That was before Brent's campaign.

He added, "We see the success [of our efforts], and now we can't stop." In a discussion with Rush Limbaugh, Brent said his "ultimate goal was to succeed, get out of the business, and get a real job." But Rush said that the left-wing bias in the media is so entrenched, Brent's work will never end: "You can't succeed. This issue will never end."

Brent certainly has made a big dent in this area. The above-mentioned Bill Walton said, "Had Brent not paved the way for the Media Research Center 30 years ago – documenting, exposing liberal bias, who knows where we'd be today? I remember reading his work in the early 1990s, and I was thinking, 'Wow, who is this guy? He has the media nailed.'"

Mark Levin, the syndicated radio host who used to work for the Reagan administration, called Bozell the "Sam Adams of our time." He called him "one of the great heroes of liberty and republicanism in the last quarter century."

Former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese noted that the founders intended that a free press "would be a bulwark against political tyranny." But today's media are so biased that they are hurting the republic: "As a result, with too few exceptions, the people are not able to get the truth about what is going on in our country, are not able to form accurate judgments. That's why what Brent [Bozell] has been doing is so important."

It's good to honor a man who has made news by exposing the left-wing bias of the news.

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